Video on demand: In defense of the Farrelly brothers

Reuniting the absurdly zany team of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, the Farrelly brothers' typically sweet and sour "Dumb and Dumber To" has become a box-office hit, its surprising success attributable to everything from the soothing of Ebola and ISIL fears to basic cable's copious reruns of the movie's 20-year-old predecessor.

But wouldn't it also be fair to say that, unlike the Rotten Tomatoes critics who've stupidly given the "Dumb" sequel a 26 percent approval rating, comedy-loving crowds are smart enough to trust the Farrellys with an unusually tender take on what's come to be known as the bromance?

I once wrote that the classic Hollywood films of Howard Hawks ("Bringing Up Baby," "Rio Bravo," etc.) are "love stories in disguise." The same could be said of the Farrellys, whose work since the late-1990s double whammy of "Kingpin" and "There's Something About Mary" got downright deep by the standards of American comedy.

Streamable on demand via iTunes, Vudu and other video on demand networks, the brothers' best movies — "Shallow Hal" (2001), "Fever Pitch" (2005) and the sublime "Stuck on You" (2003) — reveal the concentrated efforts of artists whose unusual degree of affection for their characters extends to the audience. Whatever the extremity of the films' gross-out gags, one leaves these emotionally generous entertainments feeling genuinely warm and fuzzy.

Unpretentious in the extreme, brothers Peter and Bobby would likely grimace at the insinuation that their work is political. Still, the fact remains that "Shallow Hal," with a puffed up Gwyneth Paltrow, and "Stuck on You," conjoining Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as twins with a single liver, celebrate difference not only across body type but personality.

Albeit the brothers' most conventionally romantic comedy, their other great film, "Fever Pitch," puts Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore in a story that conveys the struggle of maintaining a meaningful relationship amid obsessive male interest in sports or whatever else.

Despite the overwhelmingly negative reviews of "To," I have faith that the underrated Farrellys will get their critical due in time. Meanwhile, theirs are cult movies about the slew of obstacles that extended adolescence chucks in the path of adult development. With fart jokes.

Alas, my two favorite movies with scenes set on the upcoming holiday appear to be MIA on VOD: Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters" (1986), whose semi-comic familial tussling culminates in a lavish uptown Manhattan feast; and Martin Scorsese's "The Last Waltz" (1978), which documents the T-Day swan song of the Band in the company of guests Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Neil Diamond, Ronnie Hawkins, Dr. John and others. (Best to order the DVDs from, say, Amazon or Netflix.)

As for the instant delivery of film on Thanksgiving, those of us feeling dumb and dumber after an exhausting meal could do worse than streaming a stupid 1970s monster "documentary" — in the spirit of Trash Film Debauchery's screening this week of "Bigfoot: The Unforgettable Encounter" at the Trylon Microcinema in Minneapolis. Indeed, I'm amazed to discover that Sunn Classic Pictures' "The Mysterious Monsters," a rare "found footage" shocker from '75, is available for streaming in aptly sludgy standard definition via Amazon Instant Video.

Take it from one who recently completed his 60-page graduate thesis on Sunn's utterly bogus '70s oeuvre: I'd say the company's anti-intellectual "Monsters," promoting the "unknown" while denigrating science, documentary reportage and females of any species, is as much a mirror of the mid-'70s, post-Vietnam War zeitgeist as "Jaws" and "Star Wars."

In this supremely laughable film, Bigfoot resembles a tall man in a faux-fur bodysuit trudging purposefully through thick brush, while one purported witness claims to hear a low-fi growl that "sounds like my mother-in-law." Maybe "The Mysterious Monsters" doesn't quite make for the ideal Thanksgiving movie, but it sure is a turkey.

Send questions or comments to Rob Nelson at VODcolumn@gmail.com.